Christmas

CHRISTMAS

What did I do for Christmas? 

I ate pozole and preached the gospel.  

What is pozole? 

It's basically a thick chicken soup with a ton of corn and meat.  And we ate it with tostadas with guacamole.  It was delicious.  And super fattening.  And I was so full by the end of it I could hardly walk.  It was great. 

It was a different kind of Christmas. There were no pretty wrapped presents or nicely decorated Christmas trees.  There were no Christmas cards and very few Christmas lights.  But there was love. And lessons about Jesus.  And that was the best part.  It was a simple Christmas.  A Christmas focused on CHRIST.  

I got to talk to my favorite people.  My family.  I only cried a little...and they were happy tears.  I'm related to some pretty amazing people.

TAMALES

Someone fed us tamales on Friday and ALL DAY SATURDAY was spent in the house because I was throwing up.  I started throwing up at 6:30 in the morning and at 10:30 at night I was still throwing up.  Cool.  Little by little I'm introducing normal food into my diet again. 

Oh Mexican food.  You are so delicious.  And so painful.

A DROP IN THE OCEAN

So during my studies the other day I read a FAB talk by Elder Holland.  He talked about helping and serving the poor (poor in spirit and financially poor as well).  This tiny little part really inspired me:

A journalist once questioned Mother Teresa of Calcutta about her hopeless task of rescuing the destitute in that city. He said that, statistically speaking, she was accomplishing absolutely nothing. This remarkable little woman shot back that her work was about love, not statistics. Notwithstanding the staggering number beyond her reach, she said she could keep the commandment to love God and her neighbor by serving those within her reach with whatever resources she had. “What we do is nothing but a drop in the ocean,” she would say on another occasion. “But if we didn’t do it, the ocean would be one drop less [than it is].”⁹ Soberly, the journalist concluded that Christianity is obviously not a statistical endeavor. He reasoned that if there would be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over the ninety and nine who need no repentance, then apparently God is not overly preoccupied with percentages.¹⁰

Sometimes, as a missionary, there is a lot of pressure.  Numbers pressure.  How many baptisms, How many are progressing, How many came to church, how many.....blah blah blah.  It's stressful.  And intimidating.  And sometimes I feel like I'm doing the best I can, and the numbers just don't reflect that.  But this helped me to see that just like Mother Teresa said, this is a work of LOVE, not statistics.  If I'm working and loving.  Then that's one more drop.  And that's enough.

*more Christmas with some of our favorite members

*a spider that we found in our house.  I said that we should kill it but my companion said that it has a soul and a divine purpose too so she wouldn't let me.  She tried to catch it and set it free, and in the process ended up killing it herself.  I then had a very depressed companion for the rest of the night...

*Christmas Eve with the Hermana that made us pozole.  It's an all day thing.  She started working on this soup at 7 in the morning and we ate at about 3 in the afternoon.